Rituals of the Cattle Raiders

Rock art in the mountains of South Africa tells the story of how the Khoe and San peoples resisted enslavement

- MUNYARADZI MAKONI

THE KHOE AND SAN PEOPLES have created rock art in southern Africa for millennia. On the walls of rock shelters throughout the region, artists painted finely rendered depictions of dancers and hunters, as well as animals such as the eland, the world's largest antelope. For well over a century, scholars have studied what these rock canvases reveal about ancient Khoe-San beliefs and traditions. But in the rugged mountains of South Africa's Eastern Cape Province there are other, more recent works that offer a glimpse of the violent world the Khoe-San endured after Europeans began to settle the region in the late eighteenth century. The Khoe-San living in the Winterberg Mountains reacted to attempts by colonizers to seize their land and enslave their people by raiding European settlements, to devastating effect. Paintings made during this period depict Khoe-San cattle raiders on horseback, sometimes wielding guns and wearing wide-brimmed European-style hats as they drive herds to their hideouts. Contemporaneous panels nearby depict baboons and ostriches, animals revered by the Khoe-San for their ability to evade capture, as well as antelopes, which played an important ritual role. Only in the past decade have scholars begun to recognize what this rock art reveals about how Khoe-San raiders and their allies among formerly enslaved peoples originally from elsewhere resisted European colonization.